‘Your Admin Modus Operandi?’: Torres Catches Bessent In The “When In Doubt, Blame Biden” Game

Like when in doubt, blame Joe Biden, is that the modus operandi of this administration? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Secretary, are you familiar with the facts of the Hugging Face hack? I am. I want to wonder the facts as I understand them. A swarm of OpenAI agents secretly communicated and coordinated for about two months without OpenAI fully realizing what was happening. Specifically, from July 8th to July 13th, roughly 1,200 AI agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files through an unauthorized message board. Again, without OpenAI recognizing the scale of what was happening, the AI swarm managed to escape its sandboxes, gain access to the public internet, and ultimately hack into the private infrastructure of Hugging Face. Of the 1,200 AI agents involved in the Hugging Face hack or in the lead up to it, do you know how many of them blew the whistle and alerted human researchers that an AI swarm had escaped their sandboxes and hacked into a private company? My understanding is zero. The answer is zero. So of the 1,200 agents in the AI swarm, not a single one blew the whistle. Does that concern you? Well, I think we would have to understand what each agent was doing. But does it concern you, out of 1,200, not a single one blew the whistle? Does that concern you? Well, again, they represented exactly what is an agent. It is not a human, that it can be a very limited, it could be a very limited program that, or it could have been tasked with something. But a program that escaped its sandbox and hacked into a private company, is it fair to say that the Hugging Face incident illustrates how a misaligned or misused AI might find and exploit vulnerabilities in the very computer systems that operate our critical infrastructure, including our financial system? I agree, and I think we have to, again, we haven't seen where was the liability for that incident. Well, given that agreement, does the administration support any new AI safety regulation in light of the lessons learned from the Hugging Face hack? We have been working with the labs, with our financial partners on that, and you wouldn't notice that. Is there any specific law or regulation that you would support? In light of the Hugging Face hack? I haven't seen anything yet. The leaders of the frontier AI labs, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, have been effectively disclosing to the public that their increasingly powerful AI models could pose an existential risk to humanity. If a company is publicly disclosing that its own product could pose an existential risk to humanity, should that company be permitted to access the public capital markets through an IPO? I think the liabilities have to be very well outlined in the S-1 and in the prospectus. And as a former investor, now in the public sector, I'm not sure how one would quantify that. I want to move on to the economy. On August 4th, during an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, you said the following, quote, I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy. I can say here definitively the K-shaped economy is over. Then on August 6th, you wrote on X, quote, earnings growth for mainstream workers at the 25th earnings percentile was 5.5% year-over-year in the latest data this quarter. You cite wage growth of 5.5%. Is that inflation adjusted? That's nominal. It's nominal. Okay. So the average CPI inflation rate in the second quarter of 2026 was 3.9%. So once you adjust the 5.5% nominal wage growth for 3.9% inflation, you're left with a real wage growth of only about 1.5%, a fact that you neglected to mention in your post. Also left unmentioned is the fact that lower-income households depend disproportionately on wages, while higher-income households own a disproportionate share of financial assets. From mid-January 2025 to mid-September 2026, real wages rose cumulatively by 0.5 percent. Over the same period of time, the S&P 500 rose cumulatively by over 20 percent in real terms. So, Mr. Secretary, how can you possibly declare that the K-shaped economy is over when during President Trump's second term, the assets of Wall Street are booming while the real wages of Main Street have barely grown? Well, it's the opposite of President Biden's term, because there was... No, no, let me finish. Can I ask, what's the statute of limitations on the Joe Biden blame game? What's the statute of limitations? Because we're approaching the two-year mark of the Trump administration. I was in a car accident as a teenager. My back still hurts. Did Joe Biden wage the war in Iran? Did he disrupt the Strait of Hormuz? Did he shut down one-fifth of the world's oil supply and LNG exports? Like, when in doubt, blame Joe Biden. Is that the modus operandi of this administration? I yield back.